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Driven by digitising and the internet, genealogy has become a
global obsession - but Australians might be losing access to
valuable records, writes David Humphries.

Among the dozens of "live" files about dead people on Jan
Worthington's North Shore desk is a job from England, where an
aristocrat wants to know if any of a long-departed ancestor's vast
Sydney land-holdings might still be available for inheritance.

"The family contacted me to search for any Sydney land still in
the family but previously overlooked," says the document detective,
a professional genealogist for 24 years, who says her Worthington
Clark consultancy is always inundated with work.

It's a work in progress, given the huge task of checking every
bit of property that was in the ancestor's enormous holdings.

But the presumably cash-strapped Brits should not give up hope,
even if such inquiries can open the gate to competing claims. "I
did a case years ago where a strip of land in central Sydney had
been overlooked because of faulty title," Worthington says. "I had
to chase down this huge family tree over several generations,
because each and every survivor was entitled to a share. Everything
had to be proved."

Worthington's business is an eye-opener to anyone who thinks
genealogy - the tracing of pedigree - is a fuddy-duddy world of
cobwebs and indexes, where participants might appear as dead as
those they pursue.

Genealogy associations across Australia have tens of thousands
of members, comparable with the membership of a healthy premier
football club and exceeding those of political parties. The Society
of Australian Genealogists alone has 6000 members. The steady
parade of about 50 visitors a day to its two Kent Street libraries
in Sydney occupies seven paid staff and a host of volunteers.

Of dozens of NSW events organised for History Week, which ends
tomorrow, five relate to genealogy and include a guided tour down
the intriguing path of tracing family members through their brushes
with security services. There is an army on the march, rolling back
the details of generations lost or obscured by the dust of
time.

"It's something you become terribly wrapped in," says Malcolm
Sainty, the president of the Society of Australian Genealogists,
who got his start 45 years ago through curiosity about his family
origins and now runs a publishing business built on joining the
dots of lineage.

"It becomes like a detective story, and it sort of grabs you
because you've got various bits of evidence and they don't quite
fit. Why they don't fit, and where to find the missing bits,
becomes an all-embracing interest."

When Sainty largely completed his family journey, methodology
was even more painstaking that it is today. He wrote hundreds of
letters in search of official documents, and made many trips to
England, from where his great-grandfather had migrated in the
mid-1800s.

Today, document searches are made far easier by the internet and
websites that can contain billions of entries - from births, deaths
and marriages, to war service, to shipping records, to cemetery
records and so on. There are pitfalls, though, Sainty says. "The
user doesn't know how accurate the stuff on the internet is; nor,
importantly, what's missing from the internet."

Therein is one pitfall of internet research. Global attempts to
suck up all detail, to index and catalogue it, and to digitise each
record, have met resistance for reasons that range from
intellectual property argument and disputes over compensation, to
jealousy and interdenominational suspicion.

For instance, in the middle of the last century the Mormons
started filming English parish registers of baptisms, marriages and
burials - which can go back to 1538 - so they could baptise
ancestors into their faith.

"What's there is pretty accurate, but a lot of churches in
England didn't like the idea and refused to have their records
filmed by the Mormons," Sainty says. "So there are big holes in it,
and that can lead to big errors."

Digitising records - and feeding what the University of Sydney's
dean of arts, Professor Stephen Garton, calls democratisation of
knowledge - is expensive and time-consuming.

Consider, for instance, the challenges of digitising
(photographing or scanning into a digital, retrievable image) the
documents States Records has at its Kingswood archives in western
Sydney.

"If the cartons of records were put side by side, they'd stretch
for 60 kilometres," says its manager of public access, Christine
Yeats.

"Seventy-five per cent of our clients - 20,000 of them - are
doing family histories," she says of the agency's Rocks and
Kingswood reading rooms.

If the records could be digitised externally, with State Records
keeping a master copy for security, access would dramatically
improve, says Yeats, who says State Records has negotiated with
Ancestry.com, a non-Mormon website in Utah with more than 5 billion
records online. Ancestry arrived in Australia about a year ago and
has been buying access to records at a hectic pace.

Garton foresees Australia missing the boat, because universal
access to the "the cultural riches of our institutions" has been
done on the cheap, with consequent technical inadequacies.

"We have digitised many things, but often not in a way that
facilitates multiple usages, thereby inhibiting access to our
resources and constraining the spread of information to ordinary
men and women," he said in a recent speech marking the centenary of
the death of David Scott Mitchell, the bibliophile whose private
collection began the Mitchell wing of the State Library.

"We're way behind in digitising our heritages for our citizens,"
he told the Herald. "In the absence of sufficient public
investment, private entrepreneurs will enter the market, secure
large collections and conceivably charge a premium price for
access, thereby denying access to the less well-off And
often it is only large institutions like state libraries and
universities than can afford the fees required."

His is not an argument against investment in cultural heritage
by entrepreneurs who, he says, charge prices that are reasonable
and appropriate. It is, he says, more a recognition that "somehow,
as in so many things, we have to balance private interest and
public good".

Worthington's entrepreneurship has focused on joining the dots,
not building public bridges to records.

Her cases are all different - from finding heirlooms (see box)
to the client, suspected of murder, who needed help tracing to an
English pub the alleged villain in the piece.

"Another man came into my office with a case and revealed a huge
revolver. He said he was looking for lost relatives, but I quickly
realised he was after false identity," Worthington says. "I've been
doing this for so long you get a bit intuitive about what makes
sense or not."

Sainty says the arrival of the digital age is but the latest
catalyst of interest in genealogy.

"It really started with Alex Haley and Roots in the
1970s," he says. There were also the bicentenaries of James Cook's
1770 voyage to Australia and the 1788 First Fleet. By then, the
odium of a convict heritage had passed. That's not to say family
histories, once exposed, no longer shock. Says Worthington, whose
clients have paid up to $20,000 for her to complete their family
trees: "Every family has its skeletons in the closet."

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Time traveller &#133; Jan Worthington, who has been paid up to
$20,000 to complete a family tree.

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